Comment Other finished software (Score 2) 174
WordStar is indeed "finished software", but there are other kinds of similar software that are running everywhere. The software for many large banks run such code on their mainframes, programs written decades ago that no one dare change unless absolutely necessary for fear of what the consequences might be. The programs are stable and do what needs to be done quickly and maybe even efficiently. And because they were written for computers that were glacial when compared to today's zippy mainframes, these programs run like greased lightning by today's standards.
I haven't used WordStar in thirty-five years and that was on a 16 MHz 80386 running DRDOS but I remember it being very fast on that computer. Compare that to the LibreOffice I use today. Once I've got a document loaded, editing is very fast but there is so much about LibreOffice that is dead slow for reasons I've never been able to figure out. It appears to be doing both serious disk access and CPU crunching in order to simply load a document template. Why? Whatever happened to the simplicity of software? I think much of this comes from the fact that today's software engineers did not learn their trade on the slow computers of thirty or forty years ago, when writing tight code and using minimal RAM was absolutely necessary. Efficiency was the name of the game then. I don't think the engineers of today really know what that means.